PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, EDINBURGH.
BLACKWOOD’S
EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.
No. DLXIX. MARCH 1863. Vol. XCIII
CAXTONIANA:
A SERIES OF ESSAYS ON LIFE, LITERATURE, AND MANNERS.
By the Author of ‘The Caxton Family.’
PART XIV.
NO. XIX.—MOTIVE POWER (concluded).
The next day the atmosphere was much cooler, refreshed by a heavy shower that had fallen at dawn; and when, not long after noon, Percival and I, mounted on ponies bred in the neighbouring forests, were riding through the narrow lanes towards the house we had agreed to visit, we did not feel the heat oppressive. It was a long excursion; we rode slowly, and the distance was about sixteen miles.
We arrived at last at a little hamlet remote from the highroads. The cottages, though old-fashioned, were singularly neat and trim—flower-plots before them, and small gardens for kitchen use behind. A very ancient church, with its parsonage, backed the broad village-green; and opposite the green stood one of those small quaint manor-houses which satisfied the pride of our squires two hundred years ago. On a wide garden-lawn in front were old yew-trees cut into fantastic figures of pyramids and obelisks and birds and animals; beyond the lawn, on a levelled platform immediately before the house, was a small garden, with a sundial, and a summer-house or pavilion of the date of William III., when buildings of that kind, for a short time, became the fashionable appendage to country-houses, frequently decorated inside with musical trophies, as if built for a music-room; but, I suspect, more generally devoted to wine and pipes by the host and his male friends. At the rear of the house stretched an ample range of farm-buildings in very good repair and order, the whole situated on the side of a hill, sufficiently high to command an extensive prospect, bounded at the farthest distance by the sea, yet not so high as to lose the screen of hills, crested by young plantations of fir and larch; while their midmost slopes were, in part, still abandoned to sheep-walks; in part, brought (evidently of late) into cultivation; and farther down, amid the richer pastures that dipped into the valley, goodly herds of cattle indolently grazed or drowsily reposed.